Our society suffers both great intellectual and property loss through the destruction of books, periodicals, records, works-of-art on paper, and personal memorabilia, generally referred to herein as cellulosic materials, as a consequence of wetting by water. This wetting can involve hundreds of thousands of books during natural disasters like floods, windstorms, and fires (from water used in fire fighting). Unfortunate mishaps like leaky roofs, malfunctioning sprinkler outlets, dripping pipes, defective window wells and drainage systems regularly soak hundreds of books. At best, generally speaking, the covers are lost, the books are defaced, and their dried remains are totally useless for their intended purposes.
This tragic loss is a persistent problem that has not been solved, even though many techniques have been developed and are being applied in efforts to minimize the loss. For example, books may be dried manually by pressing water from them, placing blotter papers between pages and pressing again, and subsequently standing the books open for air drying. This technique is unsatisfactory, with the cellulosic materials beginning to mildew after a short time, and in the case of books, their drying crooked and warped.
Books have been dried with hot air in low temperature ovens, but this technique produces significant warpage and distortion, loss of covers, and likewise requires considerable skilled labor, plus the expense of rebinding, to restore them. The known air-drying techniques do not prevent the leaves of books made from coated paper from sticking together to such a degree that they cannot be separated and the entire book is unsalvageable.
Wetted books can also be taken apart and dried leaf by leaf. However, the cost per book is beyond the reach for most libraries, due to the skilled hand labor required to take the book apart, dry and flatten the pages, and rebind the book.
The best technique available today is considered to be drying books by vacuum freeze-drying. The large vacuum freeze-dryers needed for major catastrophies are only available as the large vacuum dryers built for space exploration in the 1960's and 70's. Such equipment is only known to be available in the Washington, D.C., Valley Forge, Pa., St. Louis, Mo., Los Angelos, Calif., San Francisco, Calif., and Seattle, Wash., areas. These vacuum dryers are not readily transportable, are available only when not in use for other purposes, and are virtually never available for the small routine mishaps that regularly occur. Vacuum freeze-drying capability is difficult to provide. The equipment is expensive, requires highly trained operators, and does not have built-in freezing capability. The library personnel must have the books frozen locally, stored temporarily, packed for shipment, shipped, and then prevention from thawing must be maintained. The potential for further damage is great, but the cost is so high and frequency of use of vacuum freeze-drying equipment is so low that regional groups of libraries cannot afford it.
Moreover, vacuum freeze-drying involves loading previously frozen books and bringing them to complete dryness without the possibility of intermittent straightening and adjustment to insure the books dry straight and to save the book bindings. Generally, the book comes out in the same shape it goes in. If the book is frozen crooked, it dries crooked and must be taken apart, its leaves flattened, put back together again and rebound. This not only adds greatly to the cost, but also makes the books unavailable to readers for months or even years.
The magnitude of this problem can be seen from the fact that, on average, three major fires occur each year in American research libraries with great loss of books and records from water damage. Librarians and archivists fear water damage from fire fighting so much that large institutions try to build fire-safe buildings and do not install sprinklers. Consequently, water damage from fire fighting is normally catastrophic when a fire does occur.
On a smaller scale, large public library systems, such as the Chicago Public Library, suffer a leaky-roof problem or broken-sprinkler mishap about once every two months in one of their libraries. Each time this happens, an average of 200 volumes are wetted at the Chicago Public Library. When 200 reference books are wetted, the library loses an investment of approximately $20,000, an amount which would more than repay the installed cost of the equipment provided by this invention, that would have saved these books. Up to now, public library systems, such as the Chicago Public Library, must throw away these 200 volumes and replace them with new copies.
A principal object of this invention is to provide an improved process for treating water damaged cellulosic materials and return them, inexpensively, to their original condition.
A further object of this invention is to provide an improved process for treating water damaged cellulosic materials in such a way that they can be straightened or handled during processing to overcome any warpage or deformities which have occurred to the materials by reason of water.
Another object of this invention is to provide a process for the treatment of water damaged cellulosic materials which is economical and which can be practiced with little training and difficulty and at low cost.
Further objects and advantages of this invention will be seen from the following: